Securing justice in Kashmir has become impossible not because of draconian laws like the Public Safety Act (PSA) and the Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA), but because these laws are increasingly being used to supplant the ordinary criminal justice system which has its own procedures and human rights safeguards. Moreover, a blanket legal and moral impunity in the state has led to a lack of respect by security personnel and the Jammu and Kashmir (J&K) authorities for the judicial process in habeas corpus proceedings. Court directives are simply ignored or circumvented. The impunity even allows an informal detention system to prevail whereby people, especially youth, are simply picked by Special Operations Group (SOG), taken to police stations or interrogation centres like the infamous “Cargo†(the air cargo building near the police station Shergari), and held in unofficial, illegal, incommunicado detention. Subsequently, they may be held in preventive detention.